At one point Sunday night at the Oakdale Theatre, Bonnie Raitt said it’s taken 40 years to get Taj Mahal and her together for a tour. Too bad it took that long.
It’s understandable of course. Both have had successful careers in their own right, particularly Raitt, whose career exploded in the late 1980s and early ’90s with not only chart success but also a plethora of somewhat unexpected Grammy Awards.
Well, they’re together now. And their third show of the one-month BonTaj Roulet Summer Tour was a blues explosion with each playing with their own bands, Taj joining Bonnie for a couple of acoustic numbers and then both bands playing together to seal the deal.
Taj came out first at the Wallingford, Connecticut venue and cruised through a bluesy 45 minutes with his swinging Phantom Blues Band, which includes Mike Finnigan, who has played with everyone from Dave Mason to Jimi Hendrix to Les Dudek, on keyboards, soulful guitar player Johnny Lee Schell, horn players Joe Sublett (sax) and Darrell Leonard (trumpet) and bass player Larry Fulcher. Continue reading BonTaj traveling blues show
By Young’s account he drove into the ditch and stayed away from the mainstream. That might be a little overstated. He’s had artistic and commercial successes since during his long and buoyant career and some were planted firmly in the mainstream.
First to Roger McGuinn and David Crosby in The Byrds, then to Gram Parsons in the seminal country-rock band The Flying Burrito Brothers and to Stephen Stills in Manassas. Now he has his own sidekick. Or rather Hillman and Herb Pedersen are sidekicks for each other.
From the moment I walked in I was struck by the sound of a young woman’s voice. She was set up in the cafe playing solo, accompanying herself on a Yamaha electric piano. As I walked around I kept being drawn to the woman’s accomplished classical-leaning playing and her smooth, proficient and captivating vocals.
His voice had changed somewhat but the trademark quality that graced so many of The Band’s signature tunes was intact with a slightly raspier flavor.
Rosanne Cash does that, perhaps as well or better than anybody. At the Infinity Music Hall in Norfolk, Connecticut Tuesday night, Cash mixed songs from Black Cadillac, an album dedicated to her late father Johnny Cash, and a few requests with songs from her upcoming album The List, which will consist of some of the pillars of the great American country songbook.
He rarely plays in the States but Taylor was scheduled to be at four venues in or near Connecticut: Toad’s Place in New Haven, Black-Eyed Sally’s in Hartford, the Iron Horse Music Hall in Northampton, Mass., or if you wanted to drive a little further, Misquamicut Beach in Westerly, R.I.
The place was called The Stone Balloon and was fashioned directly after the Cafe Au Go Go in New York. It was a long, narrow room with a low ceiling. Tables and chairs took up most of the audience area in front of a small stage on the right-hand side wall toward the front half of the room. Unlike the Au Go Go it was brightly lit between sets. The Au Go Go was always like a cave.
My main interest was not in the Director’s Cut, which I had bought back in the early ’90s, but in the Extras disc, Woodstock: Untold Stories. It includes about three hours of material with nearly 150 minutes of previously unreleased performances, the rest consisting of documentary video segments.